Going Beyond Paper - Why There's More To Document Scanning Than You Think

Since the days when document scanning was at its peak around the turn of the millennium, scanners are used less and less albeit with a boom in popularity with the ability to scan and duplicate documents using the high quality cameras on the likes of the iPhone and iPad. Although this is a sign that document scanning is a dying technology, there's much in the business world to contradict this.

For general home use, document scanning is on the back burner. For a period you could buy a scanner which then became an all-in-one device which included a printer which was there whenever it was needed. It was an ideal way to fight off the booming digital photography market by allowing people to make their paper based photos into digital ones with relative ease, but this need has died off since. However document scanning still has a major part to play in the way we operate in our offices.

These days there's an increasing interest in what is termed 'the paperless office'. While this term is often taken too literally, it's now a realistic option for a lot of companies to rely purely on digital documents rather than their bulky paper-based counterparts.

The only way to really achieve a paperless office from an office that is already full of important documents is to, you guessed it, get them scanned.

However this is not generally an easy task especially if you have thousands of them. You could employ someone to digitise all the files and name, or index, them by their appropriate names, but this can be a costly and lengthy procedure and the very essence of the paperless office is that of convenience and saving in terms of both money and time. So the only other option is to outsource the scanning to a document scanning company. Although you probably never would imagine such businesses would exist, you'll find there are at least one or two within your vicinity.

What sets them apart from scanning in the documents yourself is that they will be powered by industrial scanners and equipment that can process over 200 pages per minute and software which can automatically detect text of the pages making them readable and searchable on any computer system just like any other digital document that has been produced in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat.

Document scanning companies like this can process documents at an enormous rate therefore cutting the time spent on such a task significantly. On top of this they can offer reduced costs because of the sheer speed in which the process can be completed.

Once documents are converted to a digital format such as PDF or TIFF, this is where the genius of having them scanned in the first place comes in. They almost literally become like any other document you would have produced on your own computer.

If you've requested them to be made searchable you can search for any terms, phrases, words or numbers you wish and all results will be provided for you. This is particularly useful if you're searching for names or reference numbers.

You could also potentially save a lot of space with document scanning. You'll be able to dispose of the old, paper-based documents because you no longer need them and the new found space can be used for other things.

Although it isn't usually feasible to do all the scanning yourself in house a lot of the document scanning companies out there will offer free to trials to make sure that you're satisfied with the output and with such as advantages of those listed above and more, it's something that's at least worth significant consideration.